Fiction Truer Than Fact: A Haunting Autobiographical Novel
Excerpts from his journal interrupt the running text every now and then, but neither the main account nor its interruptions seem any more or less true than the other.
Reading about someone else's indulgent, solipsistic young love affair is boring unless its insights are bright enough to illumine the confusion and shame of one's own. For that, Leonard Michaels is one of the best. Whatever trouble you want to find, it's all been found before. Fear, ignorance, certainty, uncertainty, lust — ah, the draughts of youth.
Despite my lurid attraction to Sylvia and Leonard's dovetailing insatiabilities, it's his prose that pleases me the most. His sentences are sobering, instructive, gnomic, terrifying, and emotionally authentic. I believe it's what we call style, but the writing isn't merely stylish; it's vital.
Though the book contains more rumination than plot, the ending is as shocking as that of any thriller. In the final paragraph Leonard dreams of a dead Sylvia waking from a slab in a morgue: "My need was the only reality, more real than death." In the end her madness becomes contagious, though in its new host it more closely resembles hope.
Read an excerpt of Sylvia